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Boehner: I Hate SCHIP Because it Works too Well

The other day Brendan Nyhan caught George W. Bush lapsing into weird honesty on his opposition to expanding SCHIP. The problem, as Bush saw it, was that if these kids become insured, that might put us on a slippery slope to a dystopian future in which all kids and then all people have health insurance. Can’t have that.

Today, John Boehner does him one better, grounding his opposition to SCHIP expansion on the idea that “Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back.” But note here that while it’s true that there will be some displacement of private health insurance here, nobody would actually be “dragged” out of the private sector. Rather, people would shift out of it if and only if SCHIP was a better overall deal. Which, of course, it almost certainly will be. Which, as Boehner kind of explained, is exactly why Republicans are dead set against expanding it.

Photo by Flickr user David Bolton used under a Creative Commons license